Chart of the Month – November 2011 – Text Arrangements

Sometimes it's important to make one bold statement on a slide. How do you do that and make the slide interesting at the same time? We've talked about several ways in the past to dress up a slide with little content, but this is a way to dress up a slide that contains only text. Forget lines of text. Forget consistency with font sizes and colors. You can choose to emphasize words in the sentence/fragment to make a stronger point by giving them the largest font size and boldest color, or you can randomly select words to enlarge. There really aren't any rules here.

Break the sentence/fragment up into a combination of single words and strings of several words. Then resize and recolor the words/strings of words. Then begin laying them out so that they are in an easy-to-read flow and balanced layout. This is a trial-and-error process, so don't be dismayed when you can't get it to look right the first try. Try several combinations and then begin tweaking the one that you like the best to get it into the best possible layout.

If your layout needs to be enlarged/reduced, consider saving it as a picture and then enlarge/reduce the picture to occupy the slide real estate you want. If you want to reveal words/strings of words in the layout through animation, then try to produce the layout in the size you need. It's not that easy to just group the layout, increase/decrease the font sizes, and then enlarge/shrink the group. The words don't remain in the exact same layout you created.